Adams photos

Can be found at these links-

Nanako's shots
additional link to mine

head out of the clouds

summit report and Mt Adams reflection


Well, here I am, sitting in one of my favorite rest positions- at a cafe table at Ladro. I've not blogged in a while, as the clusterfuck of illness and mountain-climbing sapped my brains, will, and time. I'm mostly recovered. But I do kind of feel like heavy physical exertion makes you dumber for a while. Maybe just me; I won't make generalizations that may offend.

I climbed Mt. Adams. It was awesome, but I was sick. Real sick. So I had to make the call to not climb Rainier. I'll get to the Rainier discussion later, but I'm trying to feel good about the fact that I did climb Adams, and not dwell on the fact that I didn't do the other.

We (best friend from highschool Nanako, also hschool friend Alicia, two ladies from San Diego Celeste and Lourdez, our guide, Mick, and assistant guide Grant) set out from Seattle thursday the 3rd on a trek down to Adams, which is a 5-hour drive, and an hour east of Portland just north of the Oregon-Washington border. We camped at Lewis and Clark state park, which I believe is near Chehalis. I was super sick, the constantly-coughing-up-fluorescent-mucous kind of sick. We slept on the ground in our sleeping bags, sans tents, and by the time we got up at seven (didn't sleep so well with the coughing and the early light and the goddamn tweeting birds {what is this, Snow fucking White? I've never heard so many goddamn tweeting birds in my life.}), I had created a charming cesspool beside my cocoon. Had bag-packing 101, weighed in (I had the lightest pack, at 42.5 pounds, woo!), and set off on our way toward the mountain.

Mick told us to hydrate up on the way, and I obediently did, apparently to excess, as I was in a lot of pain on the drive from my peanut-sized bladder being over capacity. I made the caravan stop twice (via text-message), once with me comically hurtling toward the rest stop restroom only to end up standing in a line, and the second time even more comically bailing from a moving vehicle at the main intersection in Hood River to bulldoze my way through some kid's pizza party, in so much pain I couldn't even fathom stopping to attempt to form words to ask permission from the management (my apologies, Andrew's Pizza and Bakery). We were behind schedule to begin with, and combined with confusion after loss of cell reception, and at the ranger's station, we ended up a few hours later than desired at the trailhead.

But up we went, enjoying the nice weather from our stylish plastic boots. Plastic boots hauling novices and their fifty-pound packs up the slope, in combination with backcountry wayfinding makes for a really-ephing-slow trek. We made only about 2000 feet of elevation gain that afternoon before needing to set up camp for the evening. We dug out platforms for the tents and had a delicious protein and carbo-load feast of sausage-pesto pasta, soup and bread.

To our pleasant surprise, Mick extracted champagne and sparklers from his pack in honor of our true Independence, and we celebrated the Fourth from our camp at treeline overlooking White Salmon and Hood River. I thought I saw some flashes, but there wasn't anything spectacular to see from above in the form of pyrotechnics. Mick's sparklers saved the day for backcountry patriotism; whew.

Clouds blew in that night and we woke up to an overcast setting. My plastic boots were rubbing my feet and ankles raw in a couple of places, and by the end of the previous night it couldn't be avoided that something more than my band-aids had to be applied, so in the morning we tried to bandage them up. Initially Mick thought the best thing we had was duct tape, and he wrapped a layer of that around my ankles, but then it turned out someone had sports tape, and we added some of that as well. It was awkward, and a little uncomfortable, but better than the painful rubbing. (this, erin, is where you snicker at my shoe-foot catastrophe legacy.)

After breakfast we packed up camp and slogged through our first couple of snowfields in the increasing precipitation. We stopped at lunch for snowclimbing 101. The weather had turned kind of miserable, to some mist and hail/sleet business (well, we were in the clouds, after all), and it wasn't letting up. Though I was kind of feeling like a lame duck with my phlegmy wheezing and slowness, I really enjoyed and kicked ass in the snow climbing department. Perhaps it was because I got to take off the pack. We learned different step techniques (one of them, called the French Technique, haha, I enjoy and am quite good at), learned how to use the ice axe, and also learned self-arrest (handle running across the chest from shoulder to hip, between the boobies, then you flip over to throw a tantrum in the snow). We learned how to glissade, which as I'd like to provide some trivia, is French for "slide," which is exactly what it is- a fun way to efficiently descend (and your knees thank you). Woo! I was also very successful and enthusiastic at that. After lunch we gained about another thousand feet and set up high camp at the toe of the White Salmon glacier in preparation for our summit attempt the next morning.

High camp was at maybe around 8500 feet, with tents dug into the base of the glacier, the camp "kitchen" on the rocks overlooking the woods and vague notions of civilization to the south, the "gear-age" with all our junk in another area on the rocks. Pottying occured downslope on the rocks. Gotta love being above treeline; it redefines privacy.

Pooping in the backcountry occurs one of two ways for the responsible hiker/climber- burying or carrying. Though I've heard typically the "blue bags" on other mountains are just a bag for your poop, on Adams the rangers distribute an elaborate "waste pack-out system:" ziplock bag with paper bag containing kitty litter, paper towel, and printout with instructions on one side, large target on the other. You can either go onto the target, or pick it up using the paper towel. It's pretty awesome. Especially awesome if your body freaks out and refuses to go for days like mine did, then has to go three times on the last day. We buried it all in the snow until the last possible minute, but the descent back into the balmy July heat made the packs less than pleasant as we headed back down later. Yick.

Before heading to bed early that night in preparation for our 2am summit attempt, we all learned to rope up as a team, tied our prussiks, and selected positions on the rope with a setting of a stunning sunset drawn out behind cirrussy clouds. Then we attempted to get a few hours of sleep.

Sadly, I was really really freaked out, between the ankle/foot issues, which had added bruising in addition to the rubbing at that point, and the sick issues, and I didn't get a wink of sleep.

I got up feeling even more neurotic than the night before, but after a wimpy "I'm not so sure about this" to a guide who didn't respond, along I went. We roped up and headed straight up the glacier in the darkness, headlamps gleaming like some sort of candlelight procession. It got gradually steeper and steeper, and I could feel the effect of the altitude in combination with my cold in my wheezy breathing and lack of endurance. I guess that we were moving along more of a 45 degree slope in the end, but some suggested that may have been an exaggeration. May have been less, but it was definitely steep. As it got steeper and we got slower, it evolved into a sort of comedy of errors. We had a ridiculous amount of ice-axe-dropping incidents along the way, due to our newness in using them and lack of wrist straps (I was the only one who had one, but Mick told me not to use it in order to learn how to use the axe properly). Then something was rolling down the slope, and there was this big commotion which I couldn't understand because it was very windy and we were twenty feet apart, but someone yells to catch it, and as I'd offered to take the rear position, I was the last hope, so I dive to catch it like a goalie, and I do. But I pick it up, and look at it, and it's a fucking rock. Small boulders were falling down the slope. On its trip plummeting down the slope at a good clip, this one had hit Celeste, two people ahead of me, in the calf before continuing on its way. She was okay enough and highly motivated, but they kept falling and we were tasked with the job of dodging them and yelling to warn others down the slope. For some reason Alicia dropped her gloves and I caught those too, in an even more impressive goalie-dive. Maybe I should have taken up a different sport.

Because I was slow and wheezing and kept calling "zero," the code to stop, I managed to lose any good pace and drifted a little over and down too much and found myself having to cross this big crack, a mini-crevasse, that no one ahead of me had had to. So I stop the team, and ask Mick what to do, as we'd had no crevasse training, and he just yells to jump. Kind of expected "idiot" to follow his response, the way he said it. But I was really tired, and he didn't give me a rest as I think he just wanted to clear all of the falling rocks coming down the slope. So I jumped, but the upward incline and the fatigue got to me and I made it only as far as the opposite edge, and my boot hit the edge of the surface and sent me ricocheting backward. At which point I of course drop my ice axe, it skitters down the slope fifty feet, and I catch myself from sliding by hanging onto the downslope edge of the crack. Tired and hurting and very disappointed, I had to take that moment to put my face into the snow and sob.

That only lasted for a few seconds, however, and then I was back up and leading my team back down the slope toward my ice axe. As I stop to turn around and descend, a large airborne rock whizzes between Alicia and I, passing me by only eighteen inches or so. I had only a last-minute warning on that one, and was told that my half-assed jump to the side looked like something from a cartoon. Alicia, more cautious, nervous, and new to climbing than even me, took this moment to announce dramatically and loudly that that was it, she was done and not going further.

It was an epic few minutes. Mick announced that he had already decided to continue by leading us a different route, but we had to persevere on, and we hauled our asses up the remaining, steepest slope, and collapsed into the rocks on the ridgeline at the top.

Our (lack of) speed and the presence of many objective hazards, Mick said, caused him to decide to continue no further, not even as a smaller team. We'd made it to nearly ten thousand feet, with a summit at 12 thousand, and it was fine by me. I was in not-so-good shape, and the view was pretty damn awesome from where we were, anyway. The weather was good that morning, and we could see Mt Hood, and a beautifully clear Mt St Helens, emerging from seas of tiny pipe-cleaner-like trees and soft clouds. We fueled up, Nanako took an emergency pee in the open air on the ridge, and we began our descent.

Much of the descent back to high camp was scree, a combination of fluffy mineral soil, rock, and boulders, that we had to get through with crampons on pretty steep slopes, and it was tricky. I don't think there's a lot of allowance for clumsiness in successful mountaineering. Alicia actually took a dramatic, rolling fall down a steep slope. But we also got do descend on snow, both on foot, and by glissading, yay. The main snow slope we descended was very steep, and looked nearly 100 percent vertical from camp (it wasn't of course). That was pretty cool.

We had a snack, took a nap, and then broke down camp and began the final descent. Putting the full packs on (summitted with about ten pounds) and descending back into the vague backcountry was pretty arduous. We may have glissaded too much directly down, which caused us to not traverse enough, and stuck us on the wrong side of a steep, rocky drainage (and its siblings), which was kind of a bitch to traverse across in order to find the trail back. We were hot, tired, and dehydrated by the time we hit the trail. Mick kept passing streams in order to keep us moving toward the trailhead, and we deliriously wanted to kill him by the time we finally did get a drink. My feet were so bruised and sore, and I was so tired and thirsty that I turned into a zombie, trying to tune everything out in order to focus my energy to getting to the car. After I saw a recognizable point I remember passing not too long after the trailhead when we set out, I began dreaming up car mirages in my mind, thinking they'd just be right there, right after the next bend... time seemed to cease.

The trailhead did eventually come, though! We gathered, took a group photo, deposited the bags of poop, took off our boots, and gathered to have a celebratory beverage. My ankles were so disgusting. The duct tape had caused nasty abrasions that were getting all gross and infected, and I had a few rubbed and blistered areas. I felt pretty shitty with my cold, but was very happy to have done it. We gave the group gear back to Mick and headed out to Hood River for dinner together along with a debrief. It turns out that there was a significantly easier route along the south slope that requires no roping up and not much crampon use, in retrospect. Mick had decided to take us up a very difficult route to give us experience for Rainier. I wished he'd briefed us initially as to his approach to everything, I kind of went a little crazy after hearing this as I'd been thinking I was a major weenie and was very disappointed how everything went.

It was a very long, late, delirious drive back to the Puget Sound, and we ended up getting in at 2 am and I spent the next two days slightly comatose and recovering. I was pleasantly astonished to know that my training was quite effective as I had no soreness following the hike, just tight calves the next morning. Still surprised about that. I'm no athlete by nature, so that's a victory for me in itself.

In the end, I was really frustrated by my situation, but had to make the call not to do Rainier due to my cold, my ankles, and the fact that we had barely three days of downtime to regroup. My mind was not ready to do it, apparently, as I had to let Mick and my friend and coworker Sarah talk me into feeling capable, and then had a meltdown the night before leaving for Rainier. I drove down to Gig Harbor that night, just to see if I felt better, but I didn't. I'm generally bummed, but I know I made the right decision.



I'm reminding myself that climbing Adams was awesome in itself and I do really feel good and right about my choice not to do Rainier. I realized a lot about myself, through the training and climbing. One thing is that the exercise in training was not only great for physical health but great for the brain. I had no realization just what the adrenaline and endorphines would do for my state of mind, but it's like nothing else. However, I established, during my Adams climb, that I'm not the kind of person that really thrives on adrenaline enough to want to do it a lot. Intense mountaineering seems to require an efficiency and brain-focusing that doesn't fit my personality really well. There was not enough resting, no contemplating, not enough discussion for me to really truly love it like I love a lot of my pastimes. I loved it, but it was grueling, and I wanted to also be able to stop and appreciate the surroundings and experience more than we were able to. I'm also extremely deliberate, and I like to be able to think and talk things through before doing them, and you can't, quite as often, as you have to keep pace to make your goals. We did have some time-management issues that might not manifest themselves in all trips, but this trip also made me appreciate the less-intense day hikes and backpacking that I've done before, and in training, and make me want to do more of them now in my free time.

I may still do Rainier someday, but I know I won't be dong a major mountain every weekend. This has made me remember other things I love, too- I miss my family, and friends, and art and travel and swimming and books and movies and gardening. I have other things I want to pick up again. I want to begin the process of planning to move to New York.

The remaining four went up Rainier to stunningly beautiful weather this weekend. I kept my eye on that perfectly clear mountain from the city all three days they were up there.

It turns out they all, minus one, got sick with my cold. I feel super bad about it (guess I should have been slathering on the Purell; I thought I was way better before I got on the mountain). They were slow and felt terrible and must have been cursing my name. Nanako and Mick summited alone out of the group, almost to the top minus six hundred feet, both super sick (he had a fever) on a beautifully clear Saturday morning. I'm very proud of them (in a non-condescending way).

And now, just a few minutes ago, I saw in the news that Adams is spewing smoke from a 500 acre forest fire at the trailhead (Cold Springs) we left from and the Forest Service closed the area. WTF?!

Straaange world.

lame horse...

...would like to be shot.

With the training, it's like I'm always tired, always hungry, lately. Very compact social life as well. Now I'm just getting by with the thought that I can chill out all I want in less than a month. When I'm off the mountains, I'm going to sleep forever... I'm going to go out drinking regularly, especially on weeknights. I'm going to eat pastries and pie. I'm going to fork over the cash to have my own internet connection at home and blog for hours in my underwear on my bed while eating pastries and drinking cocktails. Then I'm going to find illicit things to do and go into work late the next day.

Then maybe I'll take up yoga.

urban mountaineering

Now that I have a significant percentage of my gear to head up the mountains, I'm feeling more technically prepared. On a side note, however, as it creeps closer and closer, I feel more and more anxious, and the incessant training doesn't help me feel more physically prepared, is just bringing me closer to burning out.

Nonetheless, I decided to toss the gear I had, plus some full bottles of water, cookbooks and landscape architecture textbooks, into my backpack and scale some steeper portions of Queen Anne last night after work. It was a great evening for it, calm and sunny with a lovely sunset over the Olympics. I mostly took the stairs that wind between the stately homes in the southwest portion of the hillside, but also hoofed it down and back up again through Kinnear Park. Which was comical, because as the park is a steep hillside full of invasive weeds above the industrial Interbay neighborhood, it's not all that well-taken care of, and is full of homeless people camping there. It wasn't dark yet, so it didn't intimidate me, but because I was wearing a giant backpack, it appeared as though the many men whom I passed along the way, welcoming me with smiles, nods, and even waves, were ready to welcome me into their tribe. I was friendly, but kept moving.

There are quite a few out of the way nooks and crannies that dead-end into hillsides (often with fantastic views) in that area that you might never come across, even as a Queen Anne resident, and it was cool to have a reason to stumble across them. There are quite a few homes that have front porches opening onto pedestrian paths and stairs because the grades are too steep for roads. Kind of Montmartre-sque, in that respect.

I ended up tooling up and down until it got dark (which is quite late, like nine thirty or ten in these parts this time of year), and made my way to my old neighborhood, and chatted with my former neighbors. By the time I started heading home it was well past dark, and I realized that the cats were out of food, so I figured what better way to make use of the backpack on my back, and the need for training, than to pick some up there on Upper Queen Anne and lug it home? After I left Safeway I realized I had little for me to eat at home, either, so I stopped at Metropolitan Market and threw some pasta salad in there for me, too. Which totally cracked me up, but apparently not other people quite as much, because everyone either didn't notice, or appeared to avoid eye contact with me. Which made me even more amused, secretly.

I had a hard time dragging myself out of bed this morning- big surprise.

formal commitment

I've been letting it slip here and there, telling my inner circle of people gradually, but I'm going to make a formal announcement now that the clock is ticking closer and closer.

I'm going to attempt to climb Mount Rainier. No, wait, wrong language there the first time. I'm going to do it, goddammit!




I've been training for a while, and when I go to explain to people why I'm getting near a gym (I tend to loathe organized physical activity and have been a vocal denouncer of all athletic pursuits), I explain, wincing for fear of ridicule. It's a big task to bite off, I understand. Not being an athletic type, I've put a lot of thought into it, and as the time and financial commitment of preparing for the climb is taking over my life (six days a week training, many dollars' worth of gear), I realize there is no point in stepping around the topic anymore. And it's liberating, and kind of exciting! I've forked over most of my evenings lately training on the stairmaster, ellipticals, and strength-training machines, hit the trails on the weekends, and purchased pricey mountain-going clothes, and there's no point in going back now...until we hit Paradise, at least.

I was recruited into this scheme by one of my best friends from high school, somehow, this past winter. We have a guide who we trust and has confidence in us, and who'll be breaking us into mountaineering on Mt Adams the weekend of The Fourth of July ( I guess this the most literal interpretation of to "show the ropes"), and then the following weekend we'll attempt to summit Rainier, weather permitting.

God help the weather- it's been so odd, and with the climb just a bit over a month away and a snow advisory at the passes yesterday (June, for god's sakes!), let's hope avalanche, melt, nor precipitation conditions pose any threat to the trek. "Cruel Summer" (Bananarama, Ace of Base) is playing here at Bauhaus (coffeeshop) as I type, and so far it's been true- unseasonably cool the past couple of weeks, minus a couple days and today (which has been pretty blue-skied, but atypical in the forecast). The local news people have given it the dramatic term "June-uary," and I'm hoping we don't have a "Julember" (oh god, someone shoot me, that was horrible and I'm ashamed) on our hands when the big climb comes around.

Not being a big fan of stuff, the diversion of a significant portion my salary to REI and Outdoor and More has been slightly painful, but hopefully it will be worth it in the end. I've made some biggish purchases for this recently- trekking poles, underlayers, soft shell, outer shell, fancy water-repellent pants (yeah, that's right, fancypants), and in my weekend attire of black jeans, black hoodie, and black messenger bag (to my defense, I had some small stripes and red shoes in there), I laughed while the cashier was ringing up my stuff. I asked him if it was a bad idea for me to be in all-black going up the mountain, and he said "sure, if you're not going for high-visibility; you planning on doing something sly you're not letting on about?" Yeah, robbing ice caves of secret treasure. Maybe that will help recoup costs. Then I can publish a comic book based on my adventures.

Wish me luck... until I go up, I live to work, go to the athletic club, and run around The Hill at night. Hey, I'm in better shape than I've ever been. That's kinda fun.

Listening to Aussie band Cut Copy's new In Ghost Colors. Fun and Electro-Rock-Poppy, all upbeat and French techno-ey and a good way to end a weekend.

summer's debut

or, Hike off a Hangover

The perennial drizzle that is associated with three of our four seasons here makes it so very sweet when summer finally arrives in all its warm and dry glory. May and June are never reliable in Seattle, and can be tempermental, but we're having a bit of a heat streak right now (it broke records at ninety yesterday). I'm not sure if people get so excited or involved with the weather in more predictable or even-keeled climes, but it's always amusing to me how people get so riled up over swings in the weather here.

I was feeling crummy yesterday after way too many mojitos the night before (not sure how it got that extreme, it takes a lot for me to get hungover, and I remember walking home late that night). I ended up spending my (glorious) Saturday afternoon hiking every possible trail at Discovery Park (in a feeble effort to keep training for the big climb), and may have gotten a little sun-shocked in the process- between the exposure on the bluff, and the reflection off the beach below, I was drained to the point of comatose by the time I got home from some errands and then was supposed to go out and let loose on Capitol Hill later that night. Sadly, the night ended with the decision being made for me that I needed to be taken home to watch Saturday Night Live instead of remaining at Linda's to be an uninspiring drinking companion. I had been planning on going out and having fun for a while, and I had gone and blown it. Ephin' A. It was for the best, I fell asleep 1.5 sketches into SNL and was lucky enough to be kindly tucked in in my delirium.

But now I feel like a big doofus, since hiking Discovery Park isn't very strenuous, it's not like I was at all tired, or got sore... just one of those enthusiastic Seattlites, like my boss, who got an unusually ugly sunburn on her neck this weekend, beading jewelry on her patio, or the hundreds of NW buffoons who try to drive in the quarter-inch of intermittant snow because they have the SUV-owner mentality and then roll into ditches and telephone poles because they live in Seattle where we get 1.35 inches of snow annually on average, in two bouts that last approximately twenty-one hours total. Raft down the Snoqualmie during record snowmelt? Sure! I, a generally dehydrated individual, chose to ramp up my mountaineering training on a recordbreakingly hot day after drinking myself silly the night before. Yes! Needless to say, I sucked down two bottles full of water and didn't pee once all day.

Above, a photo taken the night before, titled "Mojitos Mo Problems" by the other celebratory individual in the photo. Indicator of what was to come: my classy pantleg.

Playing in the cafe: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Awesome.

Onward and upward!